


Contingency Plans

by annabeth_at_the_helm



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: 1950s, A couple of f-bombs, Adoption, Adultery, Angst, Break Up, Cheating, Infidelity, Korean War, M/M, Mild Language, Mpreg, Vomiting, no happy ending, piercintyre - Freeform, pregnant Hawkeye
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24629407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annabeth_at_the_helm/pseuds/annabeth_at_the_helm
Summary: "Hawk, ya don't understand. Louise ain't just gonna look the other way. She always had suspicions but…" Trapper let out a long sigh. Hawkeye felt the slow roll in his belly, the shift and flutter, and Trapper, who could stillseeHawkeye's feet—unlike Hawkeye—rested a hand on his abdomen. "The baby isn't gonna be Korean, Hawk. Louise ain't stupid."
Relationships: "Trapper" John McIntyre/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18





	Contingency Plans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shadesofhades](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadesofhades/gifts).



"I used to do this for my wife," Trapper said, even as he carefully rubbed the arches of Hawkeye's feet where he sat on his bunk, legs draped over Trapper's lap.

"That makes sense," Hawkeye said. He wiggled his toes. "That does feel good. Being married wasn't apparently for nothing, Trap." He sighed, lying back, one arm beneath his head.

"Being married is a pain in the ass," Trapper said, but Hawkeye could hear the smile he wore. "No, truthfully, it doesn't matter either way. If she were here or I there, I'd still be tempted to—" he paused. "Tempted _by_ ya."

"We really need to talk about contingency plans," Hawkeye said, wiggling the other foot. Trapper obediently began to massage the second one. "Being married might save us."

"I dunno, Hawk." Trapper's hands and fingers went still, and Hawkeye levered himself—with enormous difficulty—up onto his elbows to fix his eyes on Trapper's face. "She might not be willin'."

"She's your wife, Trap." Hawkeye said. He tugged his feet back. "If you don't want to even try—"

"Hawk, ya don't understand. Louise ain't just gonna look the other way. She always had suspicions but…" Trapper let out a long sigh. Hawkeye felt the slow roll in his belly, the shift and flutter, and Trapper, who could still _see_ Hawkeye's feet—unlike Hawkeye—rested a hand on his abdomen. "The baby isn't gonna be Korean, Hawk. Louise ain't stupid."

"It doesn't matter who she thinks the mother is," Hawkeye said fiercely. "She'll certainly never guess it's _me_. All that matters is that she accepts the cuckoo in the nest, and she will—"

"Hawkeye!" Trapper's hand was heavy and implacable on the round swell, and the baby, probably encouraged by his daddy, kicked and moved again. "Ya don't know that. Louise might be willin'. But she might also turn me out of my own home."

"So what you're saying is, what? That this baby isn't important enough for you to even try?"

Trapper's eyes, downcast, avoided meeting Hawkeye's own accusatory glare. Hawkeye knew that he was being unfair—that he was angry without cause at Trapper, because he might be the child's father, but he wasn't solely at fault—but he couldn't help it. The same man who bragged with beaming pride about his two daughters back home didn't want to make provisions for the baby he'd made in Korea. Or for the baby's mother. Er, second father. First father? Whatever.

"Hawk, ain't it bad enough we're where we are right now? Ya wanna borrow trouble?"

Hawkeye yanked his legs back, twisting away and forcibly throwing off Trapper's reverent hand when he moved.

"If you're not going to protect this child," he said, "then maybe you shouldn't get a say in what happens to it. Maybe you need to pretend you're just my best friend and not my lover."

"I haven't fucked you in four months, Hawk," Trapper pointed out acidly. "You insisted, remember? Because of that baby?"

Hawkeye hunched over the round basketball that was his pregnant belly, wrapping his arms around it. This baby had been a medical improbability, and unwanted. He wouldn't wish it away, but neither could he simply accept that it was a good thing.

Because it wasn't. Being pregnant in Korea, in the middle of a war zone, with no assurance of his safety never mind any unborn child, meant that was a horrifically bad thing, with no way around it. Hawkeye felt his eyes begin to tear and sniffed hugely. His emotions were all over the place, and Trapper wasn't even _trying_ to help—

"Hawk. Hawk, listen, I'm sorry." Trapper embraced him, barely able to get his arms around him and the baby both. "I'll write, okay? But Louise only has suspicions about me right now. I can't—"

"Tell her the baby's an orphan then," Hawkeye said. He squeezed his arms tighter over the swollen evidence of his pregnancy. "You think it's easy for _me_ , Trap? I have this baby… I'm carrying it beneath my _heart_ , Trap. I love it more than—more than you, even, and I hate it at the same time. But when it's born—when the baby comes, I have to let it go. I know that. I can't keep him or her. And when you go home to Boston, you could have our child with you. Do you know how much I envy you that? This instance, right now, is all I'll ever get."

There was no way to spin that in a witty fashion. How to quip about giving away your child, the one you carried for nine months, never to see it again?

"You could visit," Trapper said gently. "Tellin' her it's an orphan might work."

"I cannot visit, Trap. Not my homosexual lover. We aren't that good at hiding it." Hawkeye sighed and Trapper held him a little tighter.

"What did ya tell Frank?" Trapper asked. "We haven't been court-martialed yet."

"I didn't tell him anything." Hawkeye finally met that gimlet gaze. "He's not very observant."

"Hawk, you're so pregnant ya can't tie your own boots. I have to do it. How could he not notice?"

"Well, I might have said I was suffering from starvation due to eating the mess tent food," Hawkeye said wryly.

"And he believed ya?" Trapper let him go, but pulled Hawkeye towards him, recapturing his feet. "My wife always said I gave the best foot rubs when she was pregnant. Though, she didn't throw up as much as you do. Also, I'm kinda worried about how puffy your ankles are."

"Trap—" Hawkeye gave him a quick, sharp glance, and Trapper yanked the bedpan out from under the bed.

Hawkeye vomited, unable to make it to latrine fast enough anymore with all the extra weight, and tried not to be embarrassed that Trapper had swept his bangs up to keep them out of the way and was watching him puke.

Intellectually, he knew Trapper was as much a doctor as he was, but he still couldn't help it. He hated being the patient—something Trapper knew from non-pregnancy experience—so it was difficult to get used to this incapacitation, or the fact that Trapper had to empty and wash the bedpan every time.

"This is all your fault," Hawkeye mumbled into the basin. "I hate you, you know."

"Wait till ya give birth," Trapper said cheerfully. Hawkeye wiped his mouth, grabbed his pillow, and walloped Trapper with it.

"I'll be under sedation for _that_ ," he said, "and I'll thank you not to be an ass about it. Make sure the sutures are neat and even, won't you? I'm lucky that I don't have to push a watermelon out of a tiny hole, but I'm very vain, you know."

"Oh, I know," Trapper replied. "I'll take neat, tidy stitches under advisement." Trapper shoved him companionably. "Your breath reeks, honey."

"Then bring me my toothbrush. I really do hate you," Hawkeye repeated, and even though nothing at all was settled, something settled in his belly, the urge to vomit again passing.

They could make this work, and he did love Trapper, even if Trapper was just a dirty rotten cheater who—even when he wasn't lying about it or chasing tail—probably didn't love Hawkeye any more than he loved any of his other exploits, but Hawkeye was comforted that Trapper _did_ love children.

He would love this baby and keep it safe, and that's all that mattered.

++

Later that week, Trapper had to sneak around to get Henry alone so that he could confess—not about the baby, but nevertheless a confession of sorts—that he had been with Hawkeye when Hawkeye felt suddenly faint and nearly passed out. He'd wavered on his feet and toppled—in what felt like slow motion—towards the floor, till Trapper caught him and carefully lowered him to his cot.

His blood pressure was much too high, and his ankles so swollen that they throbbed, even if he had to take Trapper's word for it how they looked.

So Trapper had explained that Hawkeye was sick—no need yet to say what it was, and Henry was so absentminded he wouldn't think to ask—and he needed bedrest.

"Bored," Hawkeye said, throwing a rolled up pair of socks into the air. "I've been bored, I came, I saw, I bored."

"Hawk, it's just till the meds take an effect. Ya haven't even been in that bed a whole day yet."

"I suppose you're right. Speaking of coming, when's the last time I came? C'mere, Trap." He held out his arms, forgetting about the rolled ball of socks, and they dropped down out of the air—gravity was wont to do that—and bopped Hawkeye in the face.

"No, Hawk," Trapper said. "Ya need to take it easy."

"My ankles feel like sausages squeezed into too-tight casing," Hawkeye grumbled, kicking the blanket off his feet. "They're too hot."

Trapper came over and filled the helmet they kept water in for shaving, dunked a towel into it, and began to slowly, carefully wipe down Hawkeye's ankles.

"Better?" he asked, and Hawkeye sighed.

"It is, but I have to tell you, being pregnant is really a pain." He stared up above him. "A literal pain, as it happens."

"Louise used to start complaining more around this time in her pregnancies, too," Trapper remarked, still soothing Hawkeye's hot ankles.

"I'm surprised she didn't murder you in your sleep." Hawkeye moaned a little at how good the cool water felt. "I, like many women, currently wish you could experience this for yourself. Dad."

The baby kicked, sharp and swift, and it landed right on his bladder. "Shit! I need the latrine—"

"Sorry, Hawk, bedpan for you right now." Trapper reached for the bedpan even as Hawkeye groaned.

"Have mercy," he said. "Are you an Angel of Death? I want to at least pee in private."

"Sorry, can't let ya do that. Private Tompkins wouldn't like that." Trapper grinned his most mischievous grin.

"How do _you_ know? We may be card-carrying perverts, but he hasn't said anything to disprove such a thing, I'll have you know." Hawkeye unwillingly let Trapper unzip his fatigues. He held the bedpan and waited till Hawkeye was finished, then set it aside.

"I guess you would know," Trapper said. "Have you napped with him in the supply tent yet?" Trapper said with a slow wink. Hawkeye averted his eyes; did Trapper really think he'd sneak around with some lowly private while he was sleeping with Trapper?

"Is that what all the cool kids are calling it these days?" Hawkeye asked. But Trapper's answer—which wasn't forthcoming anyway—wasn't needed. When he'd been a teenager, he and Tommy had called it "napping" too—as in, _no, Dad, we don't need any more lemonade, we're just going to take a nap._

"Ya feelin' any better?" Trapper asked, avoiding the subject like he avoided so many unpleasant subjects—which suggested to Hawkeye that Trapper didn't see their union as exclusive. He might not have thought Hawkeye was fucking somebody else if he wasn't doing exactly the same thing—which made Hawkeye grit his teeth in frustration.

"You're definitely the daddy," he said instead, and Trapper, who had been bent over Hawkeye's ankles, looked up in apparent surprise.

"Was there a doubt?" he asked, as if he'd forgotten about Private Tompkins entirely. Hawkeye bit back a retort, because he really didn't want to fight.

"No," he said. "I'm just telling you I wouldn't want to be anybody _else's_ broodmare."

"Clever, horse jokes," Trapper said, still running the cool cloth over his ankles.

"I learned them all from the cavalry," Hawkeye said. "My ankles feel much better."

"Try to rest," Trapper said. "My official recommendation as your doctor. Ya can't get out of that bunk for at least… I'd say tomorrow mornin'."

"Cruel and unusual punishment," Hawkeye said, widening his eyes. Trapper grinned again, patted his belly—the baby kicked his bladder again, obviously pleased with his daddy, the traitor—and took himself off to the mess tent, whistling.

Hawkeye retrieved the ball of socks from where it had come to rest between his chest and his belly.

"Thirty-one," he said as he threw it into the air and caught it. "Thirty-two…"

++

When Hawkeye woke up from the sedation from labor and delivery, Henry was standing guard over his bed, and the baby was gone. Trapper was nowhere to be seen, either.

"It's a boy," Henry said, without looking at him. "Radar's making the arrangements right now." He finally turned and plopped down on Hawkeye's hospital bed.

"Will he be all right?" Hawkeye asked, unable to disguise his worry—or his deep sadness. This might be all he ever knew of his son.

"That baby will be as safe as it's possible to be, but Pierce, I may not be able to keep you from being court-martialed." Henry sighed heavily. "You should be more worried about yourself."

"And you should know that's impossible," Hawkeye retorted. "That baby is my life now."

"That baby is _out_ of your life now, Pierce. You knew it when you signed the paperwork."

"And Trapper?" Hawkeye cuddled up to his belly, which was still round and fat, but squishy and loose now, without the baby to give it form.

"Trapper will come by to see you." Henry sighed again. "Frank really wants to call in the MPs."

"How will you forestall him?" Hawkeye asked, but this was mere curiosity now. Without his son he felt… empty, in more ways than just the physical sense. It was hard to care about what might happen to him.

"I threatened him," Henry said. "I said I'd send him home dishonorably discharged if he made any kind of trouble. Then Margaret threatened _me_ , saying she would go over my head to General Hammond. At this point I don't know what's going to happen. Get some more sleep, Pierce. You need it. I'll stay here for a bit longer, in case Frank sticks his weaselly nose into this any more than he already has."

But even as Hawkeye tried to sleep, he couldn't stop thinking about the baby—the one he'd never see. It gnawed at his heart, this feeling of incompletion, this idea that he'd borne a child but, if he never saw the result of his labor, had it really happened?

Hawkeye tried to tell himself things would be okay. That Trapper at least would be able to soothe some of the ache.

At last he fell asleep, but he dreamt of his baby lying in the middle of the compound, in a mud puddle, as shells exploded all around him. And then his baby lay in a foxhole… and a red burst of artillery hit, and Hawkeye woke gasping, feeling as if his heart had burst as well. Breathing sharply, heart hammering against his ribs, Hawkeye tried to calm himself—but he couldn't. Just as he was about to signal Ginger for something medicinal to calm him, the doors to post-op swung open and Trapper entered.

Trapper moved unhurriedly towards Hawkeye's bed, his eyes troubled, his posture almost insolent. Hawkeye had seen that insolent nature before—they had both exhibited it many, many times during their enforced stay with the army. They had mocked and belittled and scorned the very institution that held their lives captive, and insolence had been only a small, yet significant, part of that.

But never before had Trapper looked like that while he was looking at Hawkeye.

"Hey, Trap," Hawkeye said wearily. His body ached from the anesthesia, and his belly ached from the sutures holding his guts closed after the c-section that had brought his baby into the world. Sighing, he turned back the covers a little, sweaty and warm after his nightmare. But when he expected Trapper to come closer, to sit down and perhaps take his hand, Trapper did none of those things.

From a slight distance, kitty-corner to Hawkeye's hospital bed, Trapper shoved his hands in his pockets and looked awfully uncomfortable.

"You okay, Hawkeye?" he asked, sounding almost diffident. He wasn't quite meeting Hawkeye's eyes, and Hawkeye wondered what his wife had said. Maybe she had refused to care for Trapper's love child. If she even knew the baby was Trapper's; maybe he'd gone forward with the lie that it was an orphan he'd wanted to protect—a newborn currently residing in a MASH unit only five miles from the front.

Jesus, no wonder he'd had those nightmares.

"I've been better," Hawkeye said. "Like that time I had food poisoning for a week and still did twelve hours of surgery a day. Or the time I parachuted down into a trench dressed as Santa Claus and risked my life to save a wounded soldier. Or—"

"I get the point," Trapper said. He still didn't come any closer.

"What's the matter, Trap? Haven't you ever seen a man give birth before?" Hawkeye snuggled back into his blankets, feeling suddenly cold, and with it the clamminess of the sweat from his nightmares.

"No." Trapper was being very… cool in manner. He wasn't offering Hawkeye anything when it came to conversation, and he wasn't comforting in the least. What was going on?

"It can't have been _that_ shocking," Hawkeye said. "You saw me every day for the nine months it took to get to this point."

"Look, Hawkeye, I know you're probably upset about given' the baby up, but it's for the best. I got Louise on the phone this mornin', and she said she'd take 'im in. We're to raise him. I hope that consoles ya a bit. Now I gotta go."

Hawkeye wanted to call him back, to force him to talk more—to beg for the crumbs of his affection, but it was pretty clear that Trapper had resigned from their relationship. He'd moved on; obviously he'd never felt as strongly about Hawkeye as Hawkeye felt about him.

Trapper, looking distinctly uncomfortable—possibly with the bedfellows of Hawkeye's emotions—skedaddled as fast as he could, leaving Hawkeye alone again with his thoughts—his dangerous, unproductive thoughts. He told himself again that seeing the baby first was a bad idea, that he needed the distance anyway.

"Just another December fling," Hawkeye mumbled, laying back against his pillow. "A moment in time, never to be repeated." He thought of the baby— _his_ son, their son—and felt unaccountably depressed that he should never see him, never hold him, never be able to see his first steps or hear his first word.

Hawkeye raised his hand and covered his eyes with his forearm, then startled. His head felt warm—his hair was damp with perspiration. His tongue felt both gluey and as if it had a film of fur over it, much like he felt when he was hungover—but he hadn't had anything to drink even before the surgery. Despite the fact that the labor had come upon him suddenly—a wrenching, soul-shearing pain that left him in agonies on the floor of the Swamp as his body tried to eject something that he had no birth canal for—he hadn't been drunk.

He'd been sober enough to fist the blankets at his cot and clutch his stomach and hoarsely scream for Trapper, asleep in the other bed.

Trapper had hauled him to the OR, half-carrying a nearly incapacitated Hawkeye, to where he could lay him down on a table, and then he'd gone to get Henry, who was to help with the surgery.

They had confided in Henry around the seventh month, when Hawkeye couldn't even begin to hide his condition anymore, and despite Henry's glower and blustering, he'd kept the secret—Hawkeye might have been visibly pregnant, but no one else knew for certain—and promised to do what he could to help.

Now, in a room full of wounded yet feeling completely alone, Hawkeye tried to think, to remember what had happened—it was going away, his thoughts and his mind. He was exhausted and his brain too tired to process anything else.

Drifting back to sleep, he was still cataloging his symptoms and coming to the conclusion that he was running a fever—possible infection from the surgery—and Hawkeye went under as if he were in the ocean and suddenly swept below by the swell of a huge wave, and then he knew nothing more for a time.

++

When Hawkeye came to again, he felt much cooler. The bandages over his surgical site had been changed, and he no longer felt like he was in a fog of heat and damp.

"Your fever's gone down," Ginger said from the foot of his bed, where she was marking something on his chart. "Wasn't infection, lucky for you. Just a mild reaction to the surgery itself."

Hawkeye wondered how much she knew. How much had the camp been told about his indisposition, his need for emergency surgery?

"Looks like Captain McIntyre and Colonel Blake took your appendix out. Could have been cause for a bit of fever from that too." Ginger hooked the clipboard back over the metal footboard. "You rest easy now, Captain Pierce. Things'll be all right now."

So _that_ was the cover story. He wondered just what the story was about the sudden appearance of a newborn in camp—but he didn't have the guts to ask. He couldn't, really. It would be too suspicious, too much a condemnation of his behavior, should people—namely Margaret and Frank—figure it out. People would talk, if he asked. They would wonder how he knew, when he'd been under the knife at the time.

He supposed that if Frank wanted to call in the MPs, then maybe he already knew. Hawkeye wanted to take a strange sort of comfort in that, in the idea that maybe he _could_ ask after the baby, if Frank already knew.

But then he realized Henry hadn't said _why_ Frank wanted the military authorities. He couldn't jeopardize things any more than he already had, because maybe Frank only knew about his relationship with Trapper.

Or maybe he knew about the baby, but not the baby's father. Hawkeye felt miserable, because he was beset by worry and whirling thoughts, and those thoughts had nowhere to go. He could try to ask Henry—but Henry might not come back to see him any time soon. He hadn't made any promises to that effect beyond saying he'd stay for a bit while Hawkeye slept.

Hawkeye tried to force his breathing into a steady rhythm, to push all the worry out of his head. _Don't worry your pretty little head about it, honey,_ Trapper might have said to some nurse. He probably wouldn't have said something like that to Hawkeye. What _would_ he have said, if he hadn't absented himself from Hawkeye's side, and maybe his life? Supposing Trapper didn't pretend he didn't exist altogether, Hawkeye suspected their sexual relationship at least was finished.

Thus unable to excise the worry or slow the rapid-fire thoughts, he yanked the blanket up to his chin and shivered in the knowledge that his son might be safe, but he was forever lost to him, and Hawkeye couldn't even ask about his welfare. Even Trapper had refused to give him any details, simply by his aloof, unapproachable demeanor.

Hawkeye closed his eyes. At least the baby had a place to go. He had to keep thinking of that—only of that. The baby had a place to go, and Hawkeye could give his son that much, at least. He'd given him life—now he had to let him go.

If only he had known what was coming. It wouldn't have changed anything, not really. But maybe he could have had one positive, sweet memory from Korea.

Instead, Korea robbed him of that, too, just like it had robbed him of everything else.

++

"Well, Pierce, the good news is that Frank couldn't prove anything, because Radar did such a good job fudging the paperwork," Henry said a month later, when Hawkeye had finally been allowed to leave post-op. "But the bad news is that your baby left on a helicopter this morning on his first stop towards the States."

"Isn't he too little?" Hawkeye asked, feeling his stomach swoop. "How will he eat?"

"He'll be fine," Henry said, but he didn't seem inclined to give Hawkeye any more detailed information than that. "You should be hale enough to do your work around here again. I can't tell you how much we miss you in the OR. Frank is no substitute for your cool head or your exceptional hands. Trapper did as much as he could, but…" Henry trailed off.

"He hasn't," Hawkeye said glumly. " He hasn't spoken a word to me in the last month."

"Give it time, Pierce. You guys'll make up. I know it seems hard now but—"

"Sir, you need to sign off on the duty roster," Radar said, trotting into the Swamp.

"Is Frank volunteering—"

"—to be officer of the day again, yes sir," Radar said, and Henry rolled his eyes.

"He's outrageous," Henry said.

"Yes, sir," Radar said. "You okay, Hawkeye?"

"I'll be fine," Hawkeye said. "Now shoo." He waved his hands at both of them, and it definitely said something about the type of Henry's command that he went along with it as if _he_ were the subordinate officer.

Left alone, Hawkeye rummaged through his effects until he tracked down Nudist Volleyball Monthly, August 1950 edition, and tried—without any success whatsoever—to forget that his baby had left Korea, and was finally and utterly lost to him.

++

**Epilogue**

Hawkeye rolled up the last of his fatigues and crammed them into his footlocker, along with his old boots and his nudist magazines, and tried to accept that he was simply a bachelor again. That he was no longer pregnant, that he no longer had a lover, that everything was the way it was before Korea.

He tried to forget that his son had been sent back to the States a year ago, that Trapper had gone not long after, leaving Hawkeye singularly alone. As in one person, singular, again—no child sleeping softly in the warm protection of his belly.

He was going home—but to Crabapple Cove, not Boston. Trapper hadn't written when he'd left. There had been no note, and no correspondence since. Hawkeye knew it was better that way. He understood the choices he'd made. Too bad nothing soothed the horrible pain in his heart. He'd lost both his lover _and_ his son, and he hadn't thought things could change this much.

He should have known going off to war would change everything irrevocably, he just hadn't imagined it would involve falling in love, getting pregnant, giving birth, and losing fucking everything, all at once.

Louise had accepted the baby. Trapper was raising their son with his wife, and there was nothing Hawkeye could—or would, for that matter—do about it. After his institutionalization over the baby that had been smothered on the bus, Hawkeye knew—even, on some level, understood—that he could not see his son again. He couldn't be trusted around babies now, and even if Trapper didn't know—and he probably didn't—their son was safer with him than with Hawkeye anyway. Because Hawkeye couldn't close his eyes now without picturing that little face, the lips blue, the mouth open but eternally silenced—but it wasn't a Korean baby he saw.

No. It was his own son, and that terrified him more than the war ever had. He'd resolved to write Trapper a hundred times and explain things, but every time he'd pulled out his pencil, he'd remember how things had been left between them. How Trapper hadn't said goodbye.

But why would he? Why bother to say goodbye to a simple wartime fling, especially one that wasn't just embarrassing but criminal? They had been lucky, but going home didn't change the fact that Hawkeye was a man. And Trapper was too randy and had too much of a wandering eye to ever settle down with one person; even being married hadn't changed that.

Trapper's little indiscretions had probably gone unremarked, Hawkeye supposed. He was probably already sleeping with someone new, some pretty little nurse who'd flipped her hair at him, snapped her gum, fluttered her eyelashes.

Trapper was nothing if not predictable. Hawkeye still couldn't explain why Trapper had ever been willing to fuck _him_. But he fell for every last flirtatious trick, always had, probably always would, and Hawkeye, as he gathered up his things and threw them in the jeep waiting for him, wondered if he could go back to the way things had been before he shipped out.

But in his heart, he knew that things would never be the same again.

That they _couldn't_ ever be the same again.

And that broke his heart more than Trapper had. He wanted to do it over, to never go to Korea, or never take that first step, have that first kiss with Trapper. To never have bared his body to him, or accepted him into that same body. To never have gotten pregnant, never have borne him a child.

To never have fallen in love.

END


End file.
